How much of our recycling gets recycled?

This story in this week's Wandsworth Guardian raises real concerns about how serious the supposedly newly "green" Conservatives really are about recycling.

Throughout my time as a councillor constituents raised concerns about whether the recycling they took the effort to sort out (and remember the days when we had different coloured sacks for different recyclables, to be put out on different weeks?!) just ended up in landfill.

This story is in a different league because there isn't even the pretense that our recycling is going to the right place: recycling mixed in with refuse is going to end up in a landfill site and is contaminated (ie unusable) even if the council sought to claim it would at some later point be separated out.

This is an issue I spent a lot of time on as a councillor - I was Labour's environment spokesman on the council for eight years, and working with Labour colleagues from neighbouring boroughs brought pressure on Wandsworth to introduce the Orange sack scheme at a time when the Tories wanted to build a health-threat super-incinerator rather than invest in recycling.

I'm all for value-for-money services. But as was shown during the debacle over Wandsworth Museum, or the retendering of the street cleaning contract two years ago, or the retendering of the refuse contract just before that, the Council isn't interested in value any more; just in any old bargain-basement contractor regardless of quality. And the consequence is corners get cut.

No wonder Wandsworth lags behind on recycling.